Greediest generation may bankrupt today's workers

America is all about leaving a better country for the next generation.

Forget that now.

We are turning younger workers into our indentured servants.

We will live in our retirement castles while they will toil out in the fields to support us.

We will demand 20 percent of everything they produce, then 40 percent, then 50 percent and so on.

We will drain them dry, just like the serfs of old.

It's hard to wrap your arms around this generational theft because the scope is so huge.

There is Social Security and Medicare, which will be the main drivers of the national debt this century.

Medicare has a long-term deficit of $25 trillion, a number that USA Today reports is very optimistic because it's based on phantom savings from ObamaCare.

The newspaper also did a realistic assessment of Social Security and calculated a long-term shortfall of $21 trillion. It added up all the federal debt and unfunded liabilities and came up with a total bill of $528,000 per household.

This isn't just a Ponzi scheme. It is the mother of all Ponzi schemes.

Aging tea partyers argue they've earned their entitlements, which is self-delusion on an epic scale. Equally delusional are liberals who think we can simply pay for it all by raising taxes.

The rip-off doesn't stop here.

The military now pays out $1.35 in retiree benefits for every dollar it pays active-duty personnel. The vast majority of combat veterans who risked their lives don't see a penny of this largess because they don't hang around 20 years to get a pension.

But a pencil-pusher in the Pentagon can leave at age 38 with a lifetime check and heavily subsidized health care. As their numbers grow, we will have to scrap weapons programs and shrink troop levels to pay for them. We will destroy our military before the Chinese or Russians ever get the chance.

And then there are the state and local Ponzi schemes.

Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management has calculated that state pension plans are underfunded by $3 trillion, and city and county plans by $547 billion.

Consider Pamela Kindle, the 911 operator who appeared in The Miami Herald. She made $60,000 while working. Now, at age 63, she pulls in an annual pension of $182,000. By her mid-70s, she will have received $4 million in retirement pay.

While it was laying off current employees, Orlando paid out more than $50 million a year to former employees. Jacksonville will be paying out $132 million in pensions next year, with that figure growing to $180 million the following year. Meanwhile, dozens of cops face layoffs.

Florida counties have seen pension costs soar 75 percent in only six years, according to a report by the LeRoy Collins Institute. Pensions now eat up about 8 percent of their costs.

Residents in Hollywood, Fla., finally had enough. In a referendum this month, residents voted to slash pension benefits, primarily for police and firefighters. Otherwise the city faced firing 35 workers and imposing a 27 percent tax increase on commercial property.

The police and firefighter unions are planning a lawsuit to overturn it. Meanwhile, Hollywood firefighters are retiring with lump-sum payouts of up to $1 million because of the DROP program.

The public safety unions like to frame this fight as an attack on their rights and their wallets by wasteful politicians.

But in fact, the unions are waging a war on the working class, demanding they fund cushy retirements that can last 40 years or more. This translates into higher taxes, fewer services, more layoffs and less pay for existing workers.

Now look at the plight of the workers who must pay for the federal programs, the state programs and the local programs. The average household income has fallen 6 percent since 2007. The middle class is vanishing. But working Americans are asked to subsidize the health care of 65-year-old millionaires and the fishing trips of 49-year-old retired firefighters.

There is only one demographic that has seen an increase in income since 2007: households headed by someone 65 or older.

They are being propped up by people who no longer can afford it. And that is driving up the debt.

At some point, workers not only will have to pay off that debt, but the growing mountain of bills as the number of people sucking up benefits grows from 48 million now to 81 million in 2030.